Casa Lebai, Ribera del Duero (Castilla y León, Spain) 2019

 This wine by Rodrigo and Asier Calvo (with consultation from Isaac Fernández) is something of a project-within-a-project of the family’s outstanding winery, Bodegas Arrocal, made within the Arrocal facility along with a very promising white made from the local Albillo Mayor.  My recollection from a site visit in March of 2022 is that the entire production issues from a single 3,000-liter French oak Foudre.  When I tasted it recently alongside an extremely expensive wine of a roughly similar type (also made entirely from Tempranillo or — as it is called locally — Tinto Fino), this initially showed a distracting herbal or dry straw note in aromatic terms, but that diminished with airing, and was entirely absent when I re-tasted the wine 24 hours later.  That’s is a non-issue in retrospect, as this is a very high-quality wine that merits cellaring even though it doesn’t need more time to be enjoyed (but give it a vigorous decanting if you choose to dig in early on).  The bouquet is delicate but still intricate, with faint floral and spice notes atop a core of beautifully pure fruit that seems mostly red in tone but with some black accents as well.  These notes echo in the wine’s flavors, with darker fruit tones coming to the fore before a persistent and impressively symmetrical finish, with very fine tannins providing just a tug of textural grip to firm up the fruit’s sweetness, which is also enlivened with well-integrated acidity.  Once fully aerated, this proved to be a very stylish and beautiful wine, one that was clearly not crafted to chase “powerhouse” counterparts from the region based on dense fruit and intense oak, but rather with a view to purity and poise.  The price is more than fair in view of the quality here.